Canvas operates on a three-week release cycle through which features are added or updated. Courseware Support posts highlights from Canvas’s production release notes, a link to these notes, and other relevant content to the Canvas at Penn blog a few days before the production release, which usually occurs on Saturdays. Please contact Courseware Support at canvas@pobox.upenn.edu if you have any questions about an upcoming production release.
8/29/15 Production Release Highlights:
Publish Link: In new Canvas courses, the top of the Course Home Page no longer includes a link to publish the course. The message about publishing the course is the same, but it no longer includes a direct link to publish the course. If users have permission to publish their courses, users can publish via the Course Home Page sidebar or open the Course Setup Checklist.
Clone Group Set: After assigning a group to an assignment, instructors will receive a warning message if they try to modify a group set that has student submissions. Instructors can choose to modify the group, or they can clone the existing group set. Cloning a group set will copy the entire group set, including all groups, group leaders, and memberships; instructors only have to make changes to the affected users. Instructors can also create a new name to differentiate the cloned group set. Group sets can be cloned at any time in the Settings menu for the group set.
SpeedGrader External URLs: When an instructor views an online submission URL in SpeedGrader, the original URL submission from students appears in the SpeedGrader window. Additionally, a second link labeled View in a new tab lets users choose to open the submission in an external window. Note that some submission types cannot be displayed in SpeedGrader and must be viewed outside Canvas. This change is a modification from the SpeedGrader feature update in the July 18 release.
External Mail Handling: In the June 27 release, Canvas made a change that was inadvertently omitted from the release notes and may affect users for the fall term. Canvas now verifies incoming mail sender addresses against the address originally sent from a Canvas notification. This change may affect institutions that may use an additional email from their mail account, such as domain.edu and mail.domain.edu; any replies originally sent from Canvas with the simple domain would be returned to Canvas as the additional domain. If users are not able to view their email replies in Canvas, their account may have been affected by this email verification where Canvas cannot recognize both mail accounts as the same user. Users can update their email address for notifications in their Canvas user account and match the email with the incoming mail sender.
For a complete production release update, please see:
August 29, 2015 Canvas Production Release Notes
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Last Updated: 26 Aug 2015